Free The Forbidden Universe by Lynn Picknett, Clive Prince Page B

answer questions about his book. He appeared before the Inquisition in April the following year, no doubt with Campanella’s advice to stand firm – because of the theological (that is, Hermetic) importance of establishing that the sun was at the centre – ringing in his ears.
    Galileo’s defence was that his book had not upheld Copernican theory, but had merely discussed it. He declared that until the decree of 1616 he had regarded neither the Copernican nor Ptolemaic hypothesis as beyond dispute (contradicting his statements to Kepler thirty-six years earlier), but since then he had held the Ptolemaic view ‘to be true and indisputable’. 22 While few would blame Galileo for reneging on his own opinions and weaselling out of the situation – after all, this was the Inquisition he was facing – these were hardly the words either of a noble defender of intellectual freedom or willing would-be martyr. And yet neither does he seem an arrogant old man who refused to admit he was wrong.
    Galileo lost. The inquisitors decided that the Dialogue was a disingenuous attempt to promote heliocentricity, which it probably was, and that his attempts to disguise it as a mere discussion were totally unconvincing. He was found ‘ veementemente sospetto d’eresia ’ – vehemently suspect of heresy – just one degree below actually being a heretic. Theonly way out was to ‘abjure, curse and detest’ the very ideas that caused the suspicion.
    Galileo had to admit his error and renounce his ideas, kneeling before the altar of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, the same basilica from which Bruno had set out to his horrendous death thirty-three years earlier. Publication of anything by Galileo – anything he had written or would write in the future – was forbidden (although in the event he did manage to get some works printed in Germany). He was sentenced to life imprisonment, but as he was over seventy years old, was instead committed to house arrest. He stayed first with a supporter, the Archbishop of Siena, where one of his first visitors was none other than Tomasso Campanella … 23
    Later, Galileo was allowed to return to his own villa outside Florence, where he died in 1642. Less than a year before his death he wrote to the Florentine ambassador in Venice that:
    The falsity of the Copernican system ought not to be doubted in anyway, and most of all not by us Catholics who have the undeniable authority of Holy Scripture, interpreted by the best theologians. 24
     
    Perhaps Galileo had an unusually over-developed sense of irony.
    But what of Campanella? In 1634, the year after Galileo’s trial, there was another attempt to organize a revolt in Calabria. Whether Campanella was directly involved is unclear, but the leader was certainly one of his followers. So it was expedient, to say the least, for him to leave Rome for Paris – a well-worn route for fugitive Italian Hermeticists. There he became a favourite of Cardinal Richelieu, who persuaded the king to give him a pension. Encouraged by this, he transferred his hopes to the Frenchmonarchy, urging Richelieu to make Paris into his City of the Sun. His big hope settled on the future Louis XIV, born in 1638, who he expected to rule the world in partnership with a reformed papacy. Campanella was the first person to call the infant Louis the Sun King, as an acknowledgement of his great Hermetic potential. 25
    After Campanella’s dizzyingly strange and extreme career, which took him from castle dungeons to the favour of some of the greatest figures in Europe, he died in Paris in May 1639. But there can be no doubt that his legacy lived on.

CHAPTER FOUR
     

THE FALSE ROSICRUCIAN DAWN
     
     
    The Hermetic cause suffered several major setbacks in the early years of the seventeenth century, and for a time it must have seemed as if its hopes for a new golden age had been dashed once and for all. The first setback was, of course, the grisly execution of audacious prime mover Giordano Bruno